Spenser's general sense of good as genuine, usually

hidden, full of joy and motion, and of evil as static

and without energy.
By confronting with honest directness each of the
Spenserian characteristics which tend to disappoint a
modern reader, Lewis shows that they are effective once
the reader learns to discard false expectations and to
look at Faerie Queene in terms of what Spenser meant it
to be. It is, in spite of the letter to Ralegh, not
an epic--and Lewis shows the letter to be "demonstrably
untrue" in many ways. The poem is rather a Pageant
of the universe, its images identifiable as Jungian
archetypes. lilt is, as we say, a conunent on life.
But it is still more a celebration of life: of order,
fertility, spontaneity, jocundity. It is, if you like,
Spenser's HYmn to Life. Perhaps this is why the Faerie
Queene never loses a reader it has once gained. .
Once you have become an inhabitant of its world, being
tired of it is like being tired of London, or of life."
--Virginia R. Mollenkott
Paterson State College
The Sense of an Ending, by Frank Kermode.
Oxford University Press, 1967.

New York:

Some books are read to get historical matters straight

about literature; others are read because they face
directly and squarely the literature-theology encounter;
and still others are read because they obliquely get
at the huge questions of literature without provinciality or cheap generalization. Among the few books I
would place in the last category are Erich Auerbach's
Mimesis, Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, and
George Steiner's The Death of Tragedy. And one of
the finest to join my list (you make yours) is Frank
Kermode's Flexner Lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr
College in 1965 and now published by Oxford.
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Professor Kermode's volume has the best characteristics

of this category of book, the kind to be chewed and
digested: an excellent grasp of a mUltiplicity of
literary works without being pompous about it; an openness about the limitations of a huge undertaking; and
most of all, an implicit awareness that when the big
questions of literature are raised, theological and
religious discussion is mandatory because of the very
nature of literature. To put it too simply for a momen~
at times historical studies seem to think the religious
dimension of a critic or an age is better left unlooked
at, and sometimes, theological literary criticism forces
the religious issue so artificially that it ends up as
bad apologetics. But, to me, the outstanding attribute
of the third kind of book is the natural way in which
the historical, aesthetic, philosophical, and theological gently engage in interplay. Readability and stimulation are the direct results.
Professor Kermode's subject is intriguing. His first
sentence sets up his discussion: "It is not expected
of critics as it is of poets that they should help us
to make sense of our lives; they are found only to
attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways
we try to make sense of our lives." What follows in
the six chapters is the successful attempt to relate
the theory of literary fiction to a more general theory
of fiction. What are the connections between what a
man or an age imagines and believes as it is found in
literature and what a man or an age imagines or believes
in totality? In answering that question, Professor
Kermode ranges wide: a good look at the poetry of
Wallace Stevens and the fiction of Sartre; a perceptive discussion of the distinction between kairos
and chronos as two kinds of literary as well as
Biblical time; commentary on the metaphor of the world
as prison and the prison as world; and major scrutiny
of the ways in which, and the reasons why, fictions of
the apocalypse have always been dominant themes in the
literary imagination.

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In a rave review, one of the temptations is to comment

so effusively and so generally that the concrete particulars of the work are just forgotten. Therefore, it
is necessary and appropriate to end with some quotations, and risk the matter of citing out of context,
in order to convey the flavor of this extremely impressive book:
Men, like poets, rush 'into the middest,' in
medias res, when they are born; they also die
in medirs-rebus, and to make sense of their
span they need fictive concords with origins
and ends, such as give meaning to lives and
to poems. The End they imagine will reflect
their irreducibly intermediary preoccupations.
They fear it, and as far as we can see have
always done so; the End is a figure for their
own deaths.
We cannot, of course, be denied an end; it is
one of the great charms of books that they
have to end. But unless we are extremely
naive, as some apocalyptic sects still are,
we do not ask that they progress towards that
end precisely as we have been given to believe.
When you read, as you must almost every passing day, that ours is the great age of crises-technological, military, cultural--you may well
simply nod and proceed calmly to your business;
for this assertion, upon which a multitude of
important books is founded, is nowadays no
more surprising than the opinion that the
earth is round. There seems to me to be some
danger in this situation, if only because such
a myth, uncritically accepted, tends like
prophecy to shape a future to confirm it.
Read and re-read this book.
gesting.

I am still chewing and di--Nelvin Vos

Muhlenberg College

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